


The Queen of Faery's Smith

by thereinafter (isyche)



Category: Smith of Wootton Major - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Adventure, F/F, Loyalty, Pining, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 04:34:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13139154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isyche/pseuds/thereinafter
Summary: In which a new Smith becomes the bearer of the star, and the Queen of Faery takes a special interest in a human for the first time.





	The Queen of Faery's Smith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/gifts).



 

  
In the village of Wootton Major, during the time of the fourth Master Cook after the apprentice Alf, a daughter was born to the smith and his wife, great-great-great-granddaughter of the old Smith who bore the faery-star.

In due course there was a Twenty-four Feast at midwinter, and a Great Cake was baked that everyone present agreed was the most beautiful cake they had ever seen.

“And delicious as well,” said the chandler’s son as he took a big bite. Everyone cheered, and the Cook beamed; for he had taken his chances with an old recipe he found in the spice-box and had been secretly fretting over the experiment for weeks.

The smith’s daughter, now twelve years old and a solemn, solitary girl, cut into her slice as eagerly as the other twenty-three children, searching for the luck-pieces inside. She was disappointed at first that her fork struck nothing but cake, but then she tasted it, and it was so rich and sweet and unlike anything she had tasted before that she took small bites to savor it for as long as she could.

She was the last child to leave the Great Hall, alone, for the smithy was set apart from the rest of the village. The midwinter moon was full and bright over the Forest as she walked with her iron lantern swinging in her hand, boots crunching on the snow and cloak pulled tight around her.

The moonlight and the quiet of the evening made her feel curiously exhilarated in a way she couldn’t describe, her heart rising into her throat, leaving her wanting to dance along the path alone or break out singing.

But as the words of a song came to her lips, she halted suddenly, seeing a pale shape in the trees. At first it seemed tall and imposing, and she was a little alarmed, and then as it came nearer she saw that this was only a trick of the shadows, for it was a girl of about her age in a white dress.

She was no one the smith’s daughter had seen before in town; all the other children she knew were home in bed by now. And her clothes were strange and not suited for the weather: she wore no cloak and no hood.

“Hello?” the smith’s daughter ventured. “Are you … lost?”

The girl laughed, a sparkling laugh like light on snow. “No—no more than you are.” She stepped out onto the path. “Well met, daughter of Smith. I suspect we shall be friends. May I walk with you?” She held out a bare hand, and the smith’s daughter took it in her mittened one and was surprised by its warmth.

The girl tucked her hand through her own arm and walked beside her, and as the lantern light bobbed along she seemed brighter than the moon and more solid than the world they moved through.

The smith’s daughter had envied best friends in town walking arm in arm and whispering together. Being swept into this, she did not know quite what to do, but the girl in white felt easy to talk to, and as she had wanted to sing before, now words flowed out of her, more than they did with anyone.

She told her about how she had just come from the Feast, and all the good things to eat, and the prizes in the Great Cake. When the girl laughed again and asked her to go on, she was emboldened and tried to think of more stories that might be interesting enough for her new friend. On a normal night her walk home was short, but it felt as though they walked and talked and giggled together for hours while the moon stood still; although later in life she could never recall everything they talked about.

When they reached the bend in the path by the hollow tree before the smithy, with the girl still holding her hand and the end of this idyll in sight, she reached a little desperately for the most impressive story she had. “There’s a flower from Faery at my house, you know. It glows and hasn’t wilted in maybe a hundred years.”

“Is there?” The girl’s expression was hard to read.

“I could show you,” she went on faster, wanting to prove it. She crossed her heart like the girls at school. “It’s right up here. Wait for me a minute.”

She did not know what possessed her to dare this or what she would have told her parents if she’d lost it; for she was an obedient child who never stole or lied. But after she went into the house, crept past her sleeping baby sister and her parents’ room, brought down the heirloom casket, and unlocked it to let the Living Flower shed its light on her strange new friend’s face, the girl gazed for a moment, then laughed that brilliant laugh and told her to put it back. “It’s beautiful indeed,” she said, “and I’m glad to see it. But it was a gift to your family, and I won’t let it be said my people renege on our gifts.”

She touched the casket, and it closed itself. Then she rose on her tiptoes to kiss the smith’s daughter on the cheek, and squeezed her cold hands in warm ones. “You will see me again,” the girl said, “don’t fret,” and then she was gone—into the trees? The shadows? The earth? The smith’s daughter circled the house looking for her a while, realizing she didn’t even know what name to call, but she had truly vanished. Not even footprints in the snow; only one set looping and trailing back to the path.  
  
After putting the Flower in its box back in its place on the mantelpiece, with her cheeks burning and her thoughts confused, she quietly climbed into her bed and pulled the coverlet over her head, for she did not want to explain this night to anyone just yet.

The next day, when they asked, she told her parents the feast had been good and the Cake had been lovely, and left it at that. But she had dreams of the girl who came from the Forest, and looked for her in the trees when she walked to town, for months after.

At midsummer, when the smith’s daughter was thirteen, she dreamed of the girl again, and woke with the star from the Cake in her mouth and a strange feverish shiver like a wind coming over her; and then she knew for certain the girl was not her imagination, but of Faery.

* * *

In the following years, not having a son, her father began to teach her the craft of smithing, and she grew taller and sturdy and wiry with muscle at the forge. She also developed the unearthly singing voice of all the star-bearers. When she worked alone, she sang—like the old Smith come again, her grandmother said—but kept to herself when customers were in the smithy, and spent the rest of her time humoring her sister with children’s games or wandering in the Forest.

Her school-friends in the village began to marry and settle, but no young men visited the smith’s house unless they had a horse to shoe or a plowshare to grind, and his eldest seemed not to care. She went about her duties calmly and steadily, and forged functional, clever things on the days when she sang to herself; but the silver star on her forehead would shine sometimes at twilight, and her parents knew someday she would leave them, though she denied it.

Then, in the late autumn of her twenty-third year, the smith’s daughter, now just called Smith herself, saw the faery girl again.

She was walking down an unfamiliar path a good way into the Forest, singing as was her custom, with her dinner in a sack swinging in her hand.

On the other side of a berry thicket she found her, perched on a stump, with wild unbound hair and a pale light playing around her. It was the same girl, she knew instantly; but older, and her beauty now was a blindside punch that knocked the breath from Smith’s lungs.

She faltered in her song, and the faery’s voice came up beneath hers and carried her through the verse, pure as water. She jumped to her feet and pulled Smith into a whirling dance step, laughing when the song was done.

“I told you we would meet again, Starbrow,” she said then. Her hands were still warm. “I keep my promises.”

Smith, catching her breath, thought of all the stories of Faery and its glories and dangers she had read and heard in the last ten years, and thought too that the color in her cheeks and the brightness of her eyes were impossible to look away from.

They walked together through the trees, leaves crackling underfoot like the snow of their first meeting. She was still easier to talk to than anyone Smith knew. When the sun reached the point in the sky that meant dinner-time, Smith spread her sack on the ground like a tablecloth, set out sandwiches and fruit and a small cake she had made, and made a little fire to heat water for tea. The faery tried a little of everything, and a little more of the cake, which she praised; but she mainly sat back on her heels and watched Smith eat. She was pleased by every story Smith told about her life since the night of the Festival, and told a few very odd ones of her own in return, now and then seizing Smith’s arm in excitement.

"I do enjoy this world of yours," she said when the dinner was down to crusts and rinds, "but your time flies so fast. What's kept you from mine so long, when you wear this?" She was sitting closer to Smith now, between the roots of the tree they had settled under. She touched Smith's forehead, making the star flash and tingle, an uncanny but pleasant sensation.

"I don't know," Smith said, leaning back against the trunk. She wanted to be nowhere else just then. "My family—”  
  
"They must wonder too. You were chosen.” Her fingers circled Smith's face, down to her chin. “And have proven a very suitable choice, I think.” She smiled.

"I just never …”

Her eyes were grey and constant like books described oceans, or mountains. Her hair had the sweet singular scent of the century-old flower Smith had once tried to give her. Smith was locked in place by her touch, half afraid. She didn’t want to breathe in case she moved.

When the faery leaned in and slowly kissed her cheek, then her mouth, the same unnerving feeling flashed all the way through her, as if the star might consume her, becoming something dark and glittering and vastly outside her experience.

She felt sea-changed and overturned, frozen in clumsy innocence, grateful for each instant the faery remained there, not knowing how many it was.

Then the faery laughed and released her. When her eyes opened she was surprised to see the sun still overhead in its mundane course, and a pair of ordinary squirrels chattering over her crusts.

"Come and see my world, Starbrow, smith's daughter." She sketched a map with a burnt twig on a sheet of bark and pressed it into her hands. “It is your gift. Follow this from here, if you need a start.”

And then the faery got to her feet, leaving her still breathless in the leaves, and between one tree and the next, she was gone.

Smith knew better than to call after her this time; and what was more, she was sensible enough not to begin an indefinite journey without packing and proper good-byes; but for the first time since her childhood she wanted to.

She looked up at the sky, inhaled deeply, and felt the star burning away her future of comfortable days at the smithy and nights in her childhood bed. She wondered if this was how her three-times-great-grandfather had felt before he set out on his famous travels.

It was still shining when she returned home in the twilight, and all evening her family had trouble getting her attention.

* * *

In the morning, she told them that she needed to go away, and she didn’t know for how long. Her mother embraced her and held back tears. Her father patted her shoulder. “I knew this day would come,” he said. “I can fill orders and muddle along with the new boy.” She let them all help her pack, and said farewell a hundred times, and promised her sister to remember everything she saw.

But her heart, transformed as much as when she was thirteen, still ached to be gone. When she left the house and set foot on the road, it nearly choked her with excitement.

She found her way back through the Forest to the ashes of her fire from the day before. From there, the faery’s map led her further in, along paths that were faint as animal trails, past trees older than anything on the fringes.

The sketchy charcoal line eventually stopped at an overgrown mass of briars and vines between two rock faces. Finding no other way forward, Smith drew her favorite iron knife, one of the first things she’d forged, and began to cut the interwoven branches. She pushed in, wincing at scratches, tears, and whippy twigs. Soon she couldn’t see the path behind, and the sun was blocked by stone to each side and thorns and leaves above her. When she came close to the stone walls, she thought she could make out carvings through the shadows.

The trees changed; the scant light changed. She crossed a stream on worn, partly submerged stepping stones, and white blind fish nibbled around her feet. The water tasted of earth and minerals. The knife fit her hand and kept its edge, but grew heavier the more she cut. Some of the plants leaked sap that burned, and some lashed back. She wrapped her arms and face in spare clothing and pressed on.

After what could have been hours or days, exhausted, she stumbled out of the undergrowth onto a bright hillside. A wide blue valley stretched out before her. There was no such thing within a week’s travel of Wootton Major.

Smith peeled away the extra shirts, fell down spreadeagle in the long grass, and let the wind and sunshine of Faery dry her, smiling up at the sky. Her gift was real; she had traveled between worlds at last; and the faery couldn’t be far from her own map’s ending.

The air smelled of grass and flowers, the ground itself seemed welcoming, and her body was so tired and the sun so warm that after a while, she closed her eyes and briefly dozed—until she was awakened rudely by a white cat standing on her chest. Or it looked like a cat; she supposed it could be anything, here. But it stared at her with very catlike golden eyes, and batted at her forehead with a paw.

“Hello,” she said to it. It jumped off into the grass, then meowed. She remembered that faery folk could take many forms. “Do I know you?”

The cat didn’t answer, but started to walk decisively in one direction, tail held high. Smith picked up her things and followed it over the crest of the hill. On the edge of the forest stood a ruined tower. As Smith approached, she could see more cats gathered on the stones.

The heavy wooden door was intact, and so was the stair to the second level. She followed the white cat up to find a stone floor piled with dusty carpets, faded by the sun that beat down through the missing roof.

She yawned, and so did the cat. She was inclined to trust its judgment in the matter of comfortable sleeping places. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone else come this way,” she said as she unpacked her bedroll. The cat only blinked, and then circled itself and settled against her side when she lay down.

When Smith awoke the second time, she felt as though she’d slept a full night, but the sky was still midday blue overhead, and other cats had joined her to sun themselves. She rummaged in her pack for the pocket watch her father had insisted she borrow. It was still ticking, and read seven o’clock. “Well,” she said to herself, “that’s interesting.” The stories said time in Faery was tricky, but she hadn’t expected no nights.

She thought to explore the rest of the tower; but when she came near the stairs to the cellar level, the cats standing guard put their ears back, fluffed their tails, and began to yowl, and she changed her mind. The white cat led her away then, to show her a path that descended into the valley. She sensed that she was being dismissed.

After taking leave of the cats and descending into the valley, she discovered that time in Faery was even odder than the stories said. There were nights and mornings and afternoons, but they seemed attached to places rather than hours. Smith started to note them in the log-book she’d brought, tracking her own hours and days with her father’s watch.

There was a jungle-like wood where it was early morning, and everything felt lighter than usual, so that she could jump twice as high as she could at home. It was inhabited by flocks of infinitesimal creatures that floated down from the tall trees and then flew up again; she caught one in her hand and saw it had the wings of an insect and a human face, but it would not speak. Then the dark shape of something much larger passed between her and the sun, and she hurried on, not stopping until the lightness had abated.

The next place was a forest more like the Forest in her world, with familiar trees, where it was night under a full moon. Here she met her first recognizable people: a light in the distance that proved to be a richly set table lit with branches of candles, and some kind of strange dinner-party going on around it, eight figures in veils. When she approached them, one stood and held out a hand to stop her. The other seven seemed to notice her star at the same time, and all stood together.

Smith did not advance, but eager for conversation, asked if they had seen another maiden pass through, and described her faery. They all shook their veiled heads.

“We may not take you in,” the leader said in a chilly but polite voice, and the other seven echoed it in a whisper. “You may find what you seek farther down your path.” The veils moved with the whispering.

All together, it rather made her skin crawl, but Smith thanked them before passing around the table and back into the trees. Her star and the moon lit the way enough to see, although she kept jumping at shadows until she left the zone of night.

There was a barren place under a green-yellow sky, where she walked across a basalt circle fifty paces wide, carved with weathered writing she couldn't read, surrounded by leafless white birches. There was a ridge of bare rocks where it rained torrentially without ceasing, so she could hardly see to put one foot in front of the other; and a golden afternoon orchard guarded by a man who was half stag, who sent her on with a basket of apples that smelled intoxicating and tasted better. He directed her to a village of giants, gnarled and bent like apple trees themselves, who gave her a hot supper and a bed twice her size to sleep in, and were all happy to point to her faery friend in a dozen conflicting directions.

Finally, after wandering twenty days and nights by the pocket watch, having seen enough strange things to tell her sister for a year, she came to a long beach of black sand under a perpetual sunset. Waves rolled in silently, breaking and reflecting the red-gold sky and retreating. The air was heavy with salt and spray. Her feet in the sand made the only sound.

Smith had never seen any kind of sea before, and its vast open power both made her feel tiny and thrilled her from head to toe. She let the water catch her feet and chased it back, and yelped at the cold when the next soundless wave soaked her to the waist.

Far up the beach against the horizon, a minute scattering of brilliant lights stood out like a fallen constellation. Smith made them her goal, and chased the waves that way.

She was out of breath and shivering by the time the lights multiplied, sharpened, and took shape. A host of tall and formidable warriors, spears and armor glimmering, arrayed before white lantern-lit ships drawn up on the dark sand, facing away from her toward the clearest light of all: a woman, taller than any of them, like a silver flame.

At the sight of her Smith halted, forgetting the cold. The shining woman spoke to them of honor and sacrifice and how much they were needed, in a voice that pierced like one of their bright swords. And Smith knew that this was the Queen of Faery; and also that in another guise, she had been the girl who came to her and kissed her and called her there.

Awe and fear and wonder twisted in her chest. Hardly knowing herself in that moment, she ran forward through the ranks to fall on her knees before the Queen. In the silence when she paused, Smith heard herself beg to fight for her.

The Queen looked down on her small figure and laughed her sparkling laugh, for there is a streak of heartlessness in all the faery folk. But then her gaze turned serious, and her thoughts pressed into Smith’s mind: chiefest of which was the understanding that the star protected her from dangers in Outer Faery, and she was asking to go beyond that protection.

The Queen said, more kindly, “Starbrow, is this truly your wish, to join them on the Dark Marches? Their geas is not yours.” Her eyes still felt like the sea.

Smith stumbled over her words. “Yes, er, Your Majesty?” Her face was hot, and she was painfully aware again of her wet clothing and shabby appearance. “I can swing a hammer, and I learn quickly, and I want to do what I can, if it will help. Or smith for you, if there’s a need. Or anything.”

The Queen said, “Of all the sons of your kind who have wandered in our lands and learned of this struggle, none ever asked to fight with us.” Smith heard surprise in her mind, and approval. And she held out her hand, and it was delicate and hard and strong, and warm as it had been in Smith’s world. “How can I refuse such courage?”

She summoned a faery metalsmith from the ships. In the twinkling of an eye Smith was outfitted with faery armor beaten to her size, and a shield and spear and sword like those the warriors held.

Other retainers came to the Queen, bearing a chest of weapons and mail surpassing those as much as they surpassed human work, and began to arm her.

The Queen kissed her on the forehead like a white-hot brand beside her star, and looked down at her from what seemed a great height, and said, “You will be one of my mariners for a voyage, then; and this time I will lead you.”

* * *

The Sea of Windless Storm tossed their ship like a toy, while the air was eerily still. The elven warriors pulled the oars in shifts, dragging them through the roiling waters.

Smith was grateful for her strong back, though she knew the others greatly outstripped her. When it was her time to rest, or sleep in her hammock slung below the rowing-bench, she spent it all recovering strength for the next time, clinging to handholds and lines to keep from falling, and grateful when her oar-partners took pity and brought her food.

The Queen stood in the prow with the captain and her forbidding generals, holding the rail and looking out at the waves, like a shining figurehead.

She was overstepping her place just to be there, but Smith couldn’t stop herself from staring and memorizing the sight. The Queen was before her while she rowed, and in her dreams when she slept. Sometimes in those dreams the Queen kissed her again, in her true form and others, and she awoke aching and appalled by herself.

Her companions at the oar were a pair of elf-women, one solemn and dark-faced with two daggers at her belt, one laughing and pale with red curls. They told her they had names but not in a way she could understand, so she privately called them Red and Two-knife.

They shared the terrible beauty of all the warriors, and spoke to each other without words, and so Smith was very shy of them at first; but they were kind to her when they did speak. One period at the oar, she broke into a Wootton Major work-song without thinking, and feared she had angered them, but then Red exclaimed aloud in delight and Two-knife asked to learn it.

After that they were more easy with conversation. Smith learned that it was the warriors’ custom to share stories and songs across the oar-benches, but all the stories they knew among themselves had been retold back and forth many thousands of times, and anything different was irresistible.

The same long sunset stretched across all the Sea, fading toward black as they came closer to the Unlight, with no stars. As they pulled the ship on into the dark, Smith diverted them with descriptions of her home that they all found disproportionately amusing. In return, they told her of the doom of the mariners, how they were bound to cross into the Unlight and battle what waited there on the dark shores again and again, and rise if they were struck down to fight again, because millennia ago they sided with those who helped release it.

“But that is a sad story, Starbrow,” Two-knife said, “and very ancient history.”

“Tell us more about your feasts,” said Red, leaning her head on Two-knife’s shoulder. “We have no celebrations so odd in Faery.”

“And the machines your people make,” said the woman on the next bench.

“And your poems and legends,” said her oar-partner, a merry one with trinkets braided into his hair.

The rowers cheered and pounded on the benches and called for other things until she gave in and racked her brain to describe everything they asked for.

“It’s well known the King has grown a soft spot for you humans; he spends all his time away with you now; but we never heard of the Queen taking such particular interest in one before,” said Red at her next break, peering forward in the gloom.

Smith heard this with a little pleased shiver. The Queen was looking back from the rail, she felt it, but she kept her eyes on her oar.

“She hasn’t led us to battle in …” Red paused. “Centuries, by your reckoning.”

“This voyage is already fodder for many tales,” Two-knife said, nodding.

Two rowing periods on, the light had almost failed, and the warriors drew lots for a fishing expedition. Red was chosen as one of those in the small boat, lashed to the deck, each with her glittering spear. They beat a drum that vibrated through the still air to call the prey to the surface. The thing that answered their call was tentacled and spined and put up a vicious fight, leaping over the boat and nearly sinking it or dragging them under, but the warriors prevailed; and when towed back and cooked, the meat was deliciously savory, and cheering to body and mind.

After the meal, the Queen addressed them all before they returned to the oars, urging them to keep faith with each other through the Unlight, where they would see nothing and only trust in their heading until the ship struck the land of the Dark Marches.

They began to row. The light in the sky died, then the light of the lanterns, then the light of Smith’s star, and finally even the Queen’s light faded and went out.

But as it did, she began to sing, and the mariners joined, in a great chorus that bound them together and sped them along through the dark; and Smith’s heart was lifted, and she set to her oar with a will, joining her voice to theirs though she did not know the words.

As they pulled and sang together, the Queen’s voice seemed to reach out to all of them individually, and to wrap around Smith and shield her.

And once again Smith was caught up within the Queen’s mind, and emotions not her own echoed powerfully into hers: concern, fascination at Smith’s potential, desire to protect this foolhardy lovely mortal thing.

* * *

She floated outside herself in a haze, guarded from the Unlight by the force of the Queen’s magic, until the oar stopped short in her hands, the ship’s hull scraping over rocks, and she realized she could see lights.

First a beacon, and then a low red glow, and her own star leaping to life again. And there were voices shouting from other ships, feet running to pull them up the shore, and the warriors of her ship rising from their oars, and the Queen calling them to make ready to charge.

The warriors poured down off the deck and up the beach like a wave, but as the Queen passed she said to Smith, “Stay here, of your courtesy, Starbrow! The forge is where you are most needed.”

She followed the red glow to find the metalsmiths of the host at work, and made herself useful at any task they ordered, while above them the first clash of the battle began.

They strove against a great chaos, out of which horrifying things emerged whose shapes were hard for her mind to comprehend. Later, she only remembered them clearly in nightmares; and the battle itself was an incoherent welter of images, screams, the ring of hammers, and the smells of burning metal and steaming seawater.

The forge light they did not like, and the warriors carried their own lights, and the Queen was always at the front like a beacon, hewing them back. Smith repaired countless broken swords and spears and armor eaten away with vitriol or crushed by jaws, and warriors kept coming back for more.

She watched the tide of battle turn inexorably, as the warriors were ground down and forced back; then, cries and unearthly screams as a new assault of horrors broke through their line. Smith looked up from the glowing metal before her to see the Queen separated from the others, pinned down by a towering shadow with only Two-knife and Red beside her.

Not thinking, Smith seized a spear and shield from the newly quenched rack and sprinted for them, intending to distract it, perhaps, though she had no training. The star flared brightly, and within the shadow there was a churning and a twisting, and it surged away from the Queen toward her.

She had a moment to gasp before the shadow rolled over her, filling her mouth and lungs with what felt like dust. Arms tipped with hooking claws raked into her out of the mass and retracted farther than they could have come, pulling her far uphill into the dark, and then off the ground, dangling her head with the star away from itself. She felt things tear in her sides and legs.

Smith had lost the shield and spear in the first instant, but still carried her knife from home. She fumbled for it, coughing out putrid dust, and slashed wildly. The blade connected, drawing a sickening shriek from wherever the creature kept its mouth, a note of almost human surprise in it; and she remembered that cold iron was inimical to Faery.

She stabbed again through the lacerating pain in her sides, screaming, and felt herself slip a little, and again, until the grip of the claws loosened and she slipped all the way free. A few seconds of weightless panic as she fell into darkness, not knowing how far, and then her head hit stone, and it swallowed her.

She woke to half-awareness, pain in all her limbs, and a deadly weakness overtaking her that she feared was loss of blood. The star cast a tenuous circle of light around her face, and she saw rough sea-slimed stone, climbing up at an angle.

She struggled to lift a hand, and saw it red with blood and a pale silver radiance; and as she crawled she found smears ahead in the dark, and dragged herself down after the light of her own trail.

She remembered little of that descent, except that when she thought she could crawl no longer, there was light again; and the Queen lifted her and carried her away, and she knew no more.

* * *

Smith floated in and out of consciousness for most of the return voyage, aware only of pain and then the Queen’s power engulfing her again to dull it.

When she at last awoke clearheaded, she was in a strange bed with soft linen, morning light streaming through the window, and a sweet smell in the air. Her wounds no longer pained her, but in each place her skin was threaded with scars that shone faint silver.

She tested her legs, and finding they would hold her, went in search of whoever had tended her here.

It was only a small cottage, but scrupulously clean, and outside she found a green lawn that ran down to a river bright with lilies; and faery maidens danced there in a ring, weaving in and out, and on the grass waiting her turn stood the Queen.

“This is the Vale of Evermorn,” she said, “and you are here at my behest.”

Smith fell to one knee and began to thank her, but the Queen raised her up, shaking her head. “I fear I have done you a poor turn, Starbrow,” she said. “I wanted more pleasant adventures for you in my world. But, for your deeds, you have earned any honor from Faery you might ask.”

Smith shaded her eyes and looked out across the lawn, not knowing what to ask, until she did. She chose to be bold. “Then, Lady, would you dance with me again?”

The Faery Queen’s laugh echoed across the river and down the waterfalls of the Vale.

She kilted up her skirts and drew Smith into the dancing ring, but would not relinquish her as a partner to any of the others. When flowers sprang up at her feet, she decked Smith’s hair with them, until she was quite a sight to behold; and after the dance, she dismissed her maidens to show her no end of other pleasant things.

And that night (for there was night in the Vale of Evermorn, when the Queen decreed it so) and for many nights to come, Smith slept joyfully in the Faery Queen's arms.

* * *

When Smith returned home, after a year and a day in mortal time, she had enough songs and tales from Faery to satisfy her family and the townsfolk, but she would never tell the full story of her scars, even to her mother.

She never married, and every year after, she went away at midwinter and came back with other marks of battle. The things she forged became stranger and more magical, and eventually she took over the smithy completely. Her sister married the former apprentice boy and moved to the next town, leaving her alone in the old house.

When her hair was more grey than brown, one night in winter, she was walking home from the Great Hall, swinging a lantern of her own design, when another silver-haired woman in white stepped out of the trees. The Queen’s face was new but familiar, like all her faces.

“We have been friends and more, have we not, my Smith? May I walk with you now?”

“Always, Lady,” Smith said, smiling and taking her arm with her gloved one, though she heard a shadow of bereavement in her voice; and she prepared herself to face it.

"We made the star to be passed on, in time," said the Queen, later, in her bedroom. "The King wished it to be a choice, to give it up willingly."

Smith started to say that she understood, she had expected it one day, but the Queen stopped her mouth with a hand. "I would give you another choice."

The light around her body faintly illuminated the room, sheets woven and sewn by hands Smith knew, furniture passed down from her parents and theirs.

"Give it up for a new child, yes," she said, and it was a question as much as a command. "But then join my mariners in truth, bind yourself with their oath, and stay.”

Smith heard her full meaning, and her human heart quailed a little to think of that endless cycle of expiation, crossing and fighting and returning, battling the chaos of the Unlight across the unimaginable depths of time.

“You care for them, do you not?” the Queen asked. “You would fight beside them again?” Even here she could sense the Queen’s mind a little, and this careful elision of her own feelings filled her with tenderness.

Smith touched her own forehead, and the bit of silver fell into her palm like crumpled foil. She wanted to weep at how small she felt, how impossible the choice for a mere old woman.

But she also remembered singing in the darkness, and dancing with the Queen in the Vale of Evermorn, and lying beside her under an alien moon. She imagined leaving her forever behind the soon-closing doors of mortality, and her heart could not support it.

She drew up the strength she still had, looked into the Faery Queen’s eyes, and took her hand.

“I will,” she said.

And this time when the Queen kissed her it was another sort of transformation, for she felt her years and apprehensions fall away like the star. And Smith dressed in her armor of faery metal, and took up the sword she had reforged a hundred times, and passed out of the home of her birth.

* * *

Her apprentice boy swore all his life that at sunrise, he saw two faery warriors tall as trees, on shining white horses, riding out of the snowy smithy yard into the Forest. There were some who said he was drunk, and some who believed him, for the stories about the Smiths of Wootton Major had grown elaborate over the years. But what everyone knew was that the house was found neat and clean, with a letter leaving everything to her sister; and Smith daughter of Smith was never again seen in the world of men.

 


End file.
